On one spring weekend morning, long before freezing weather opens its clutches on Cambridge, the baseball team practices with wooden bats inside Lavietes Pavilion.

Before the crack-thwap of ash and leather ignites the day, captain Mann leads stretches and ticks off team objectives.

“I just feel like setting goals like that, they’re more wishes than anything,” Mann says. “Trying to take on more of the mental approach to the game.”

That’s not his only responsibility.

“Yeah I get to pick [where we eat],” he laughs. “Sometimes the rooming stuff—who gets to room together. Then I decide whether we’re going to get pizza delivered to the room. Coach usually gives me a couple of options and I just go ahead and give him the nod for the best one.”

Reports an amazed Klimkiewicz: “he always seems to know what’s happening beforehand.”

Appropriately, people skills aren’t just a bonus at the catcher position; they’re practically a prerequisite.

Mann has them in spades. Where catchers must act the caddie to a cohort of nerve-wrecked pitchers, Mann thrives. Four years of experience don’t hurt the cause.

“We [catchers] get to call our games here,” he says. “Coach has faith in us to do a good job.”

* * *

Perhaps it’s appropriate that Schuyler Mann carry the torch for Harvard catchers—launched by James Tyng, the Crimson backstop who wore the world’s first catcher’s mask in 1877.

Perhaps Mann has become the best-hitting Crimson catcher in the 128 years since.

But his real value shows where the captainship calls. Wes Cosgriff, a sophomore lefthander, has battled testicular cancer since a diagnosis this fall. It was the captain’s job to rally the team around the fallen teammate.

“I think he handled it very well,” Farkes says of Mann, “keeping the team informed and setting things up to make sure we keep Wes involved.”

It’s been awhile since captain Schuyler Mann’s days of little league bliss. Once a kid, now a man, he’s glued Harvard baseball together for a 2005 title run.

To hear him tell it, all it took was a little luck. The reality? He’ll exercise that combination of talent and diamond savvy long after the twilight of his Cambridge days.

Circumstances be damned.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.